Culture

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?) Dunham has, over the years, fuelled panics about campus rape culture, suggesting ‘sexual assault

Stepford students have been busy in recent years picking off targets from the past to vent their fury at. Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and Edward Colston in Bristol are the most high-profile victims of this attempt to wipe parts of posterity from the face of university campuses. Now, there is a new target: William Gladstone, the only man to have served as Britain’s Prime Minister on four separate occasions. Students at the University of Liverpool are demanding that Gladstone’s name is removed from a hall of residence. His crime? According to a petition, he is guilty of having benefited from the proceeds of slavery: ‘William Gladstone is known to have

There has been an equivocal reaction, wouldn’t you say, to the Church of England’s pronouncement that little boys should be allowed to wear tiaras and high heels at school, while issuing a helpful form to encourage teachers to report transgender bullying; the new rules, it says, are designed to ‘challenge homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying’; (the second is new to me). Stonewall – which has changed its remit quite a bit from the old days when it campaigned just for gay rights – has welcomed the move. But as you’d expect, Christian evangelicals have taken a more dusty view. It’s hardly new for the CofE, though. Back in July it

It’s interesting that everyone is making such a fuss about this ‘dangerous wild lynx’ that has escaped from a Welsh animal park. Various reports have described it as ‘fearsome’ warning that it ‘could eat pets’ and be ‘aggressive if cornered’. The park itself ­­– Borth Wild Animal Kingdom in Ceredigion – says that: ‘There have never been any recorded attacks of a lynx on a human, but they are a wild animal… and will attack if cornered or trapped. If you spot her, please don’t approach her.’ Animals escape from zoos and wildlife parks all the time. Another lynx, ‘Flaviu’, escaped last summer in similar circumstances from a park in

It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this month, marks a national calamity whose casualties are still being counted. When my father-in-law comes to visit, I have to hide my modest collection of Russian propaganda: he grew up under the Soviets and has few fond memories of the experience. He can’t work out why old agitprop is so popular today. But the simple fact is, for all the disaster they wrought, the Bolsheviks did leave a legacy of images so striking that, even now, they can draw thousands into a museum. As Tate Modern is about to demonstrate.

If someone had told you 10 years ago that it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘Men cannot get pregnant’, you would have thought them mad. That would be like punishing someone for saying, ‘Humans need oxygen to survive’. And yet here we are, in 2017, where PC has spun so violently out of control, and the cult of gender-neutrality has become so unwieldy, that one of the most controversial things you can say these days is: ‘Only women can get pregnant.’ Apparently that’s offensive to transmen (women who identify as men). ‘Men can get pregnant, too’, trans activists cry. Which strikes me as a real-life version

Very good piece from Giles Coren (as usual) on the intrusive and aggressive act of putting ‘xx’ at the end of emails. I had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I suppose one could quote Derrida and the structuralists and insist that there is no one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the ‘xx’) and the thing signified (putting your tongue halfway down some babe’s throat). There certainly isn’t when I do it. But there’s the fear. What if the recipient isn’t a structuralist? Incidentally, if you want to see where we are right now with this issue, just read the comments from Caroline Kirkpatrick.

David Lammy has been making headlines today, accusing Oxford of ‘social apartheid’ because it offers so few places to black British students. This claim is based on an FOI request Lammy submitted to the university asking how many black British A-level students each college has offered places to in the last six years. The most eye-catching statistic is that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not offer a place to a single black British pupil with A-levels in 2015 and Oriel College has only offered one place to a black British A-level student since 2010. There is no doubt that Oxford does admit too few black British students, but

The ultimate purpose of a university is, without fear or favour, to pursue the truth, and in furtherance of that ideal I try, as an historian, to go wherever the evidence leads me. That some folks – even some academic colleagues – may not feel comfortable with the end results is of absolutely no consequence. I’ve always been supported by the institutions at which I’ve worked and by the colleagues with whom I work with.  But it’s now becoming clear to me that this world and these norms are under attack, and – scarcely less worrying – that they are being betrayed from within. Consider the following two stories that

Oh, the glorious hypocrisy of it all – the dozens of actresses, UN goodwill ambassadors among them, who have come forward to make accusations against Harvey Weinstein – and yet whom said not a word between them when they were on the make and he was in a position to help them with their careers. I should say that if you are important and mature enough to serve as a UN ambassador you ought to be brave enough to report wrongdoing that is going on beneath your nose – and not wait until there is a bandwagon on which to leap. Worse, it turns out that in 2009 some of

During a riveting session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with sporting brainboxes Mike Brearley and Matthew Syed, discussion touched on the Ringelmann effect. This is the tendency for members of a group to perform less well together than individually. Old Ringelmann observed it in tug-of-war in the early 20th century. On their own the athletes pulled a big weight. In a team they grunted, grimaced but didn’t pull so much. They were skiving; sheltering behind teammates. You can bet Ringelmann would be rubbing his hands over the state of the England football team. After a seemingly interminable World Cup qualifying campaign full of the dreariest football imaginable, England flopped across

Donald Trump and the United Nations don’t appear to have much in common. Trump is loud, angry, insular, lumpen and uncultured. The UN is caring, sharing, virtuous, and busy saving the world from war, famine and disease. But they do share something important: they are both worms in an apple. Trump is a statist hollowing out a conservative movement and a nativist who made it to the top of a nation of immigrants. The UN, founded on horror and hope after World War II, was supposed to uphold international norms and universal rights. It was an idealist’s dream. Yet that mission has been debased by a General Assembly packed with member